Scavenger of Souls

by Joshua David Bellin

  “I am Asunder!” he shouted, his voice turned to a symphony of voices by the canyon walls. “All who come to me are reborn, and become as little children again!”

  The bearded man worked on Aleka for a good hour while the rest of us watched. Though he said nothing, he pantomimed all his motions in an exaggerated way, and Tyris’s face passed from wariness to guarded approval. First he took the pouch from his belt and poured what looked like water into a clay bowl, then laid brown bandages in the water and kneaded them until they were soaked through. A pungent smell rose as he worked. Carefully he bathed Aleka’s wound, wiping away the blood to expose the protruding bone. She winced but didn’t flinch. Before setting the fracture, the man inserted four long, thin needles, maybe made of bone, into her forearm above the break, and her face relaxed visibly. Then, with a swift, expert motion, he snapped her bone into place and wrapped another dampened bandage around her wrist. With this temporary cast holding her arm steady, he emptied a bundle of bright green leaves from a second bag at his side, and after grinding them in his mouth for a couple minutes, he spat out a lumpy green poultice and packed it evenly over the injured arm. Another layer of the brown bandages completed the cast, and the man stood, bowed low to Asunder, and returned his supplies to his bag. Then he vanished back into the canyon wall, slipping through a man-size fissure I hadn’t known was there.

  Aleka barely made a peep during the entire operation. Her face calmed, and what color she possessed returned to her cheeks. She looked up at me and Tyris with gratitude before closing her eyes, murmuring a word I didn’t know: “Melan.” In seconds her breathing took on the smooth, steady rhythm of sleep. It happened so fast I wondered if there was some kind of drug in the healer’s potion.

  But I didn’t have time to think about that. No sooner did Aleka drop off than Asunder’s men approached us again, this time holding brown cloths and gesturing toward our eyes.

  At the sight of the blindfolds, Wali’s anger returned. “Are you kidding me?” he snarled. “What’s with this secret-agent crap?”

  Asunder’s face showed no offense, but his eyes sparkled as he turned Wali’s way. “You are in our lands now,” he said simply. “And here our word is law.”

  “Your word is bull,” Wali growled. “Why should we trust you?”

  “Trust or no trust,” Asunder said, “you must obey.”

  Wali’s hands clenched, and for a second I thought he was going to launch himself at Asunder. Archangel must have sensed it too, because he stepped away from me to stand closer to his leader.

  Asunder, though, didn’t look worried. “Your spirit is admirable,” he said in his calmest tones. “But this is a fight you cannot win.”

  “I’ll be damned—”

  “He’s right,” I said to Wali. “You’re not helping.”

  Wali’s anger shifted instantly to me. “I don’t remember electing you leader. Just because she’s out—”

  “You have a better plan?” I said softly. “You want to take them all on?” Personally, I wasn’t convinced we could take on Archangel alone, even if our hands were free. “What about the kids? What’s going to happen to them if we get ourselves killed?”

  Wali’s look stabbed me. “Laman would never have put up with this.”

  “Yeah, well, Laman’s dead.” A pang shot through me as I said the words, the first time I’d said them out loud. “And so is Soon. Unless you want to join them, you’d better do what he says.”

  Fury reddened Wali’s face, but he shut his mouth and tried to control his breathing.

  “All right,” he said. “But when they walk us off a cliff, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “If they walk us off a cliff,” I said, “I’ll remember to thank you on the way down.”

  Asunder had stood watching us argue, an amused smile on his lips. Now he signaled for his men to put on the blindfolds. I glanced around at our group, saw the bewildered expressions on Tyris’s and Nekane’s faces, the terror on the kids’. The old woman slept on in the warrior’s arms. Only Nessa returned my look with a steely calm. Unexpectedly, meeting her eyes strengthened my resolve. I knew that if I was going to get us out of this, I had to think like a leader. And that meant making sure we didn’t lose anyone else.

  The last thing I saw before the strip blocked my vision was Asunder’s self-satisfied smile.

  We marched in darkness, the warriors guiding us with their hands as our path sloped gradually upward. At one point the darkness became absolute and the air turned chilly, and I figured we’d entered a cavern that cut into the wall of the gorge. We banked this way and that in the dark, our footsteps taking on the echoing sound of an enclosed place, and before long I lost my bearings. When we emerged into semidarkness and the hotter air of the outside, I became convinced our detour had served no purpose except to confuse our sense of direction. But then we sheared inside the canyon wall again, and this time we didn’t come out into the open. Instead, we stopped moving. I felt hands untie the blindfold, and I took my first look at the world around me in at least an hour.

  For a moment it was as dark as the world inside the blindfold. Then torches sprang to light, and I blinked in the sudden brightness. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that we stood inside a tunnel, a bare gray space of solid rock no more than five feet across, with a curved ceiling that hung a mere foot above our heads. Archangel’s hulking body stooped nearly double to fit in the cramped space. A strange, musky odor filled my nostrils, maybe from the smoke of the handheld torches.

  Asunder took the lead once more as we started down the tunnel. The torches threw our shadows against the walls, and I realized those walls weren’t as bare as I’d thought. In fact they were covered, floor to ceiling, with stick-figure drawings in faded red and brown. I picked out images of humans with animal antlers, hunters tracking four-footed creatures, dancers spinning around rough sketches of campfires. My eyes were caught by one drawing that had been rendered with more than usual detail: a solid brown shape that rose to two sharp points, with a single human figure standing between the uprights. The artwork, flickering and twisting eerily in the torchlight, sparked the word I’d been searching for to describe our captors, a word I had no memory of learning about a people I’d never imagined I had the possibility of seeing.

  Cavemen. They were like cavemen.

  But not dirty, hairy, backward cavemen. Archangel might be stooped, but I could tell he wasn’t stupid. Like the rest of them, he was far cleaner than us, lacking the layer of accumulated grit that clung to us like a second skin. Their skimpy outfits were neat and unsoiled, and though their weapons might be primitive, they’d made ours look like pathetic toys. I wasn’t sure whether Asunder and his followers were a survival colony, but they operated like a people perfectly at home in their surroundings, totally unlike the desperate, day-to-day fight to stay alive I’d known under Laman and Aleka.

  We walked for maybe fifteen minutes, the drawings parading on both sides of us in an unbroken mural. If the tunnel had been built by human hands, it hadn’t been built with humans Archangel’s size in mind. But the giant lieutenant showed no signs of discomfort as he followed along, not even a hitch in his breath to suggest his lungs were compressed by the awkward position. I had just turned to inspect him, hoping to catch a hint of his thoughts in his broad, expressionless face, when I bumped into the warrior in front of me and realized Asunder had called a silent halt.

  I looked around and saw that we stood in a spot where the tunnel branched into three. Curtains made of the same material as Archangel’s cloak hung over each entrance. Asunder turned to face us, and though his eyes were only a dark flicker in the torches’ glow, I had the creepy feeling they were directed at me.

  “We stand within the outer circle of the Sheltered Lands,” he said. “Here you will rest for the remainder of the day, while your minds are permitted time for reflection. Your blindfolds we have removed, that you might see clearly the promise we hold for all who seek the one true way. Your hands w
ill remain bound until it is shown to us that you have chosen to accept the gifts we have to offer.”

  He lifted the central of the three curtains, revealing a shallow cave lit only by the tunnel’s torchlight. When the warriors began to herd us toward the opening, it was obvious these were prison cells. And when they began to divide our colony into three—adults in one cell, teens in another, little kids remaining in the company of the warriors—Nessa and I jumped forward at once to prevent them from separating the children from the rest of us.

  The reaction was immediate. For the first time since they’d captured us, they pointed the wicked-looking spears at our chests, surrounding me and Nessa with a palisade of lethal spikes. Before any of us could move, we were pinned by the warriors, Archangel holding Wali so tightly it was as if his body had been frozen into stone, the adults and children hemmed in by a swarm of armed men. The leader shook his head sadly, but his eyes flashed with the first sign I’d seen of anger. This time when he spoke, there was no mistaking that his words were aimed at me.

  “You will find that a leader’s first charge is to compel obedience from his people,” he said, torchlight coloring the facets of his eyes. “For their own good, lest disaster befall them. Perhaps that is one lesson your former leaders, in their folly, neglected to impart to you. Let us hope for your sake that you discover this wisdom before it is too late.” Then, with a dismissive toss of his head, he signaled his warriors to lead us into the caves.

  “Great move, Commander Querry,” Wali said.

  The four of us were alone in one of the cells: me, Nessa, Wali, and Adem. We’d been here for hours, the only change in the monotony coming when two of Asunder’s people pushed aside the screen and entered to give us brown mats to sleep on. They kept their heads down and said nothing, and it took me a second to realize they were women, long-haired like the warriors, wearing brown bands across their chests and around their throats in addition to their loincloths. When they left, Adem retreated to a dark corner, huddling against the wall, but Wali resumed the pacing he’d begun when we arrived. As he walked, his hand played with the hollow of his throat, as if he was still feeling for the ring they’d taken from him.

  Now he stopped in front of me and snapped his fingers an inch from my face. “Ground control to Querry. Come in, Querry.”

  “I heard you,” I said.

  “So what’s the plan, boss? We going to stick around and learn more of that bastard’s ways of wisdom?”

  “Quiet,” Nessa said, gesturing with her eyes toward the cave opening. Light from the tunnel threw a guard’s silhouette against the curtain.

  With a visible effort, Wali lowered his voice. “Well?”

  “Let me know your alternative,” I said, keeping my voice down, “and I’d be happy to listen.”

  “You weren’t so interested in my alternative before,” he said. “But I’m sure they’re petrified now that they think a scrawny kid’s in charge.”

  “Someone has to be in charge,” I said. “The last thing Aleka told me to do was take over from her. Which is exactly what I did.”

  “And you’re doing such a brilliant job, too,” Wali sneered. “You tell him your name, you let him lead us into this maze . . . What’s next? You going to offer Bea and Keely as his personal slaves?”

  “Did you see the women?” Nessa whispered. “It’s like they actually are slaves. And don’t you think it’s a little suspicious that—”

  “That’s what I’m saying!” Wali cut her off. “The whole thing’s suspicious. And Querry’s working on ways to get us in so deep we’ll never get out.”

  “I’m still waiting to hear your alternative,” I said.

  Wali paced to the cave’s mouth. The guard’s shadow didn’t budge.

  “I’m trying to figure out a way to get us out of here,” I said. “Alive. You think I trust Asunder? You think I don’t see what he’s doing? But I’m not about to put everyone at risk just to show how tough I am. We’ve lost enough as it is.”

  Wali turned from the cave mouth and glared at me across the shadowy space. I stared right back. His hand clutched at his throat, like the missing string was a lifeline he was grasping for, or a noose he wanted to slip around my neck.

  Nessa looked back and forth between us. Then she hooked a hand around Wali’s arm and pulled him away from the curtain. When she got him in front of me, she stopped and smiled. I thought she was going to make us shake hands or something equally ridiculous, but instead, she released him and leaned over, her long braid dangling to the ground.

  “Go on,” she said to me. “Take it.”

  At first I thought she meant her hair. Then I saw, nestled securely in the strands of her braid so it was hidden when her hair hung down her back, the handle of a pocketknife.

  “I can’t loosen it myself,” she said. “Take it.”

  I reached out and gripped the handle of the knife. She’d woven it so tightly between the links of the braid a few strands caught and I had to yank it free.

  “Ouch,” Nessa said, but when she lifted her head she was grinning.

  “How did you . . . ?” Wali said.

  “Well, while you boys were busy being no help at all . . .” She smiled again, a devilish smirk I’d never expected to see on her pertly pretty face.

  Wali tried to hug her, but the best he could manage was a rough shove. “Did I ever tell you I love you?”

  “Thankfully, no.” She held her hands out to me. “The first thing a leader has to learn, Querry,” she said with a wink, “is to never underestimate the deviousness of his subordinates.”

  I stifled a laugh, then fingered the blade open and laid it against the brown ropes binding her hands. The cords had a springy, living feel beneath the metal.

  Adem had stood and joined us. Everyone in our little huddle leaned over the knife as I sliced the ropes. As I’d expected, they resisted in a rubbery way, but in a second I had Nessa’s wrists free. Wali shoved his hands toward us next, and I gave Nessa the knife so she could do the honors. When all of our bonds were cut, Wali started for the curtain, but I grabbed his arm to hold him back.

  “Get off of me,” he said, shaking me loose. He was older and stronger, and I didn’t try to fight back.

  “We’re staying here,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” he said. “This is our chance!”

  I shook my head. “You said it yourself. This place is a maze. If we try to escape now, we’ll be right back where we started. Except without our one weapon and with someone like Archangel watching us. We need to wait for them to drop their guard before we make our move.”

  Wali paced to the curtain and stood there for a second, quivering with anger. Then he returned to me.

  “So let me get this straight,” he said. “You give them the green light to lead us here, where you knew we’d get lost. And now that we have our one chance to get free, you tell us we can’t, because we’re lost. Whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “My side,” Nessa said. She reached out and touched my hand, then loosened and retied her braid with the knife held securely in its links. Next she retrieved the ropes from the floor and, making sure to disguise the knots, tied them loosely around my wrists and Adem’s. I did the same to hers.

  Wali watched the whole procedure in silence. When Nessa reached out to retie the cords around his wrists, he flung himself away and retreated to a corner of the cave. She started to follow him, but fell back when she saw the murderous expression on his face.

  I played what I thought was my trump card. “Wouldn’t Laman have wanted us to stick together?”

  He gave me a look of pure hate. “You don’t know what Laman would have wanted. He taught me and Korah to fight. What did he teach you?”

  I was trying to come up with an answer when Nessa spoke. Her voice was filled with sorrow, but her words were made of steel.

  “Korah’s dead, Wali,” she said. “We know how much you loved her, but you can’t bring her back. The question is
, are you going to help us keep the others alive?”

  Wali’s eyes blazed, and when he spoke, the words came out bleeding and raw. “Screw you, Nessa. You were always jealous of what me and Korah had. Why don’t you and your freak boyfriend go end your miserable lives? In fact”—and he took a step toward us, hands knotted in fists—“why don’t I just do it myself?”

  Nessa didn’t back down. Her eyes, I thought, glistened with unshed tears. But she took my arm and steered me away, while Wali hurled curses at our backs. They echoed loudly in the tiny cave. The guard outside remained motionless. Adem covered his ears and sank once again into his corner.

  “Well, that went just the way I planned,” I said, trying to smile.

  “Give him time to grieve, Querry,” Nessa said softly. “He’s in so much pain right now, but he’ll come around. I’ve known Wali forever, and I know he’ll do what’s right for the colony.”

  “If he doesn’t—”

  “He will,” she said, putting a finger to my lips. “Now let’s make our plan. Whatever happens tomorrow”—and her eyes flashed in the semidarkness—“I want us to be ready for it.”

  4

  Asunder’s men came for us in the morning.

  At least, I assumed it was morning. Spending the night in an enclosure more substantial than a tent was a first for me, and where I expected sun, all I got was more gloom. But the warriors who threw aside our curtain and prodded us with the butts of their spears were obviously anxious to get going, so it seemed the day had dawned.

  I’d spent a restless night. For one thing, I discovered that Adem made up for his lack of intelligible speech with a surplus of snoring. I’d never noticed it when we slept out in the open, but in the tiny cave his snorts and snuffles just about rattled my brain. More importantly, I kept turning over in my head how we were going to get out of this trap. Wali had finally relented and let Nessa retie his cords, but I still didn’t trust him not to foul up our plan. And I had to admit, it wasn’t much of a plan. Figuring Asunder might ease off once he’d gotten whatever he wanted from us, Nessa and I had agreed we should play along for the time being, not confront him openly. That might not win our freedom, but it might open up space for us to operate, and it was sure better than charging headfirst into a nest of armed warriors. Still, it was a pretty slim hope, and as the hours of the night marched relentlessly toward dawn, it started to feel slimmer and slimmer.